By Misty MacDuffee, Corey Peet and Chris Genovali

As the Canadian federal inquiry examining the 2009 Fraser River sockeye salmon collapse in British Columbia kicks into full gear, one might be surprised to learn that at the same time, the Marine Stewardship Council wants to designate this fishery as “eco-certified.”

Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification for the Fraser River sockeye fishery raises serious questions about the process and methodology for MSC certification, especially given the latest Fraser sockeye collapse of some eight million fish. Even the possibility of MSC certification for Fraser
sockeye has led many of BC’s environmental NGO’s to express qualms about the logic and rationale of the MSC, as their judgment in this matter has, thus far, overlooked serious concerns about the status and management of Fraser sockeye.

It is an unfortunate situation as the existence of MSC certification should signify an opportunity to increase the protection of wild salmon on the coast and to work around the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) who have been a major obstacle to achieving that goal.

MSC began in 1997 when the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever – a major seafood buyer – formed a partnership to try to leverage buying power into transformative change for global fisheries and collectively define sustainable, or at least environmentally preferable, fisheries. A collaboration of this type represents a potentially powerful step forward, as conscientious members of industry can work with NGOs to integrate conservation and social justice agendas into fisheries sustainability.

This new approach also changes the role of governments, given their poor track record at managing fish, into a follow-up function that implements policy as it is defined by the collaboration between industry and NGOs. This scenario has the potential to drive substantial change as long as the
environmental NGOs involved fully grasp the conservation science at the local level. It is also key that they never lose sight of the fact that establishing sufficient rigorousness for such a process is of paramount importance to ensuring that their integrity is not squandered for bad tradeoffs.

The Raincoast Conservation Foundation recognizes the value that certification could play in terms of improving fisheries practices. However, we are concerned that MSC relationships between the client (industry) and the certifier are far too close and not independent. Secondly, we are concerned that the MSC criteria sets a low bar and will not result in transformative change. These factors have allowed them to endorse fisheries around the globe that are not sustainable. For example, the stock status of
both Alaskan pollock and New Zealand Hoki have declined under MSC certification. Their criteria also lack sufficient ecosystem considerations. For example, BC salmon fisheries do not consider whales, bears or other wildlife that depend on salmon. In addition, if the Fraser River certification moves forward then Cultus Lake or Sakinaw sockeye would also be certified; this leads us to raise the question, is the MSC actually sanguine about certifying endangered fish populations?

Certification must account for all environmental (and social) issues facing the certified fish in question, even if this means committing to continuous improvement on certain issues, especially as science and conservation objectives evolve. Failure to do so is greenwashing and forces NGOs who are also working on these issues into difficult positions, where they find themselves opposing the MSC instead of supporting it.

As an example, the industry is proposing that MSC give the green stamp of approval to pink and chum salmon runs in the Great Bear Rainforest, the area where Raincoast has been working for over a decade to protect salmon- grizzly systems and other important salmon ecosystem linkages. In the last
several years, however, there has been a disturbing silence at the time of year when these streams should be vibrant with spawning fish and splashing bears. Raincoast believes it to be imperative to account for these types of ecosystem functions when considering a fisheries sustainability.

We suggest that the MSC re-examine both their process and certification standards are determined and pay much more attention to their ecological shortcomings if they want long-term legitimacy from conservation groups. They need a transparent, independent and impartial certification process, as
well as a mechanism for ongoing improvement of criteria that would continually push for the highest fishing standards and truly drive conservation in the world’s oceans. To attain this, they must address the structural flaws in their certification process and commit to incorporating ecosystem objectives for marine and terrestrial environments. Their brand reputation is at stake and they run the risk of turning their theoretical supporters into very real opponents if their approach to these issues is
allowed to continue.

Misty MacDuffee is a biologist with Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s wild salmon program. Ecologist Corey Peet is an aquaculture specialist and Raincoast board member. Chris Genovali is Raincoast’s executive director.

When British Columbia Conservation Officer Andrew Anaka learned that a Bella Coola Valley resident was threatening to “pop” a grizzly bear mother and her three cubs for stealing salmon off his deck, Anaka advised the man to instead remove his salmon. He said the family of bears should only be shot if they were an imminent threat. The resident did not remove the salmon and later shot all four bears.

Read the full story at  Huffington Post

As the Canadian federal inquiry examining the 2009 Fraser River sockeye salmon collapse in British Columbia kicks into full gear, one might be surprised to learn that at the same time, the Marine Stewardship Council wants to designate this fishery as “eco-certified.”

For the rest of this Raincoast article visit The Huffington Post at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-genovali/would-a-grizzly-bear-cert_b_615947.html

Re: Grizzlies at risk: province; Dwindling bears given threatened status,  The Journal, June 4.

Sustainable Resource Development Minister Mel Knight should be commended for finally listing the province’s grizzly bears as a threatened species and for keeping the trophy hunting ban in place. However, he falls critically short by failing to restrict access to grizzly habitat, as universally recommended by ecologically informed bear biologists.

Significantly reducing incursions into the bear’s habitat by the energy and forestry industries will be required if Alberta’s grizzly population is to recover.

In addition, the article states categorically that there are 17,000 grizzlies in B.C.; this number is speculative and should always be qualified as such. Grizzly population estimates in B.C. have been in dispute for many
years and remain a point of controversy.

Chris Genovali, executive director, Raincoast Conservation, Sidney, B.C.

Although Dr. Chris Darimont initially made his mark with seven years of cutting edge research on BC’s coastal ‘rainforest wolves,’ he actually specializes in all large carnivores, not just Canis lupus.

A University of Victoria graduate trained as an evolutionary ecologist, Chris has developed strong scholarly and practical interests in animal welfare. As a Conservation Biologist for the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California (Santa Cruz), his research focuses on sensitive carnivores, like wolves and bears, which endure some of the most severe suffering among wild animals due to direct (e.g., trophy hunting) and indirect (e.g., food competition with fishers) human effects.

As a vocal advocate for animals, Chris subscribes to an ‘informed advocacy’ approach. Several television documentaries have focused on his work including Discovery Canada’s Rainforest Wolves, Canadian Geographic’s Secrets of the Coast Wolf, and National Geographic’s Last Stand of the Great Bear. His work is also commonly featured in print (Discover Magazine, Nature, New York Times, Oprah magazine) and on radio (CBC, National Public Radio).

Chris also believes that conservation biologists must lead by example.

Accordingly, his research employs exclusively non-invasive methods. His current focus for Raincoast is assessing how much salmon is required to sustain key terrestrial species, such as grizzly bears.

This question probably means more to Chris now than ever, as he explains: “I’ve been blessed with my own ‘cub’ this spring (our first). My partner, Alison and I were fortunate; we had access to abundant and high qualityfoods throughout our pregnancy. Our daughter Maëlle emerged from the womb happy and healthy. The same may not be true for the bears.”

“My family will travel with me and the Raincoast team to BC’s Great Bear Rainforest this field season,” he says. “We will embark on the second year of what we believe to be the most important applied conservation work on the coast; counting bears and cubs, and assessing their health in an era of dwindling salmon runs.”

Chris Darimont’s work with Raincoast is more urgent than ever. At the policy level, we are pushing for meaningful changes to salmon harvest regulations that now allocate only a small amount of salmon to bears and other wild creatures.

Did You Know?

Grizzly reproduction includes delayed implantation in which the embryo waits for a signal of good things to come before developing.

Female coastal grizzlies – even if pregnant – can only have cubs if they consumed enough salmon before heading for winter hibernation.

For the full story in the Seaside times click here

A collective of Canadian environmental groups has written an open letter to Premier Gordon Campbell decrying the provincial government’s proposal for an aerial wolf kill in efforts to protect the dwindling mountain caribou population.In the letter, sent Monday, 16 environmental groups state they are strongly opposed to the killing of wolves — as well as other carnivorous animals including cougars and bears — arguing human activities such as the logging of old-growth forests and snowmobiling are the main causes of mountain caribou population decline.

“These herds are small because they have lost habitat on a massive scale,” the letter stated. “Even if we could kill all the predators, these herds could still be wiped out by incidents such as automobile accidents, avalanches, stress from snowmobiles and fluctuating winter conditions unfavourable to their survival.”

The collective — which includes groups such as the Valhalla Wilderness Society, Raincoast Conservation and the Animal Alliance of Canada — proposes four alternate solutions: stopping clear-cutting and road-building in mountain caribou habitat; stopping snowmobiling and heli-skiing in historical mountain caribou wintering areas; habitat restoration in clearcut areas; and reducing the speed limit on the Salmo-Creston Highway, where a number of animals have been hit by passing vehicles.

Anne Sherrod, chair of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, said on Tuesday the group had not yet received a response.

The provincial goal is to increase the mountain caribou population — now estimated at 1,800 to 1,900 animals — to the pre-1995 level of 2,500 animals within 20 years.

The proposal for the aerial wolf kill first surfaced in February.

In March, the B.C. Supreme Court put the brakes on development of a coal mine near Moberly Lake because the provincial government did not sufficiently consult with the West Moberly First Nation or accommodate its concerns.

In one of Nature’s most elegant pas de daux, salmon and bear engage in a delicate dance for survival.  The bear is losing…

We’re searching for solutions to one of the most critical questions facing coastal B.C. today: how to guarantee grizzlies enough salmon to ensure their survival. – Chis Dairmont

Download the pdf story

As Raincoast’s research vessel Achiever pulled into the inlet on British Columbia’s north coast I glassed the port side shoreline with my binoculars, checking for wildlife.  It was that magical time right before dusk when unexpected and unusual things often manifest in the coastal fall alpenglow.

No one else was on deck and I was standing in the observation tower. On the port side of the inlet, at the water line, was a bear. As I focused in I could see this was “not your average bear,” to paraphrase a well-known (cartoon) bruin. Everything about its appearance was distinctive. The coat was a champagne-type colour I had never seen on a coastal bear.

At first I thought it might be a Spirit bear (Ursus americanus kermodei), but as I peered through my binoculars it appeared to have all the physical characteristics of a grizzly, with the dish shaped face, the hump between the shoulders, the size of the feet and length of the claws.  But the perplexing factor was that this bear’s skin colour – the pads on the feet were pink, the fleshy end of the snout was pink, the skin around the eyes was pink – all signs of albinism.

Was I really looking at an albino grizzly?

I called my colleagues to come up on deck from down below.  They all emerged with binoculars in hand and we proceeded to go back and forth speculating on exactly what kind of bear we were observing.  There seemed to be consensus that it was an albino, but whether it was a grizzly or not was discussed and debated at length.

To this day I’m convinced it was Ursus arctos, although in the end I suppose it doesn’t matter – seeing an albino bear of any species is a once in a lifetime experience.  More importantly for me, it was yet another confirmation of the power and mystery of the Great Bear Rainforest in the half-light before sunset.

Did You Know?

Animals can be pure or partial albinos. Pure albinos usually have pink eyes, scales and skin. They’re pink because, without colouration, the blood vessels show through. It’s estimated that at least 300 species of animals in North America have albino individuals.

BC’s Spirit bear is a black bear that has white fur due to a rare genetic trait; it is not an albino, as it typically has a brown nose and eyes.

By Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun, March 18, 2010

The public has rejected the idea of an aerial wolf kill in B.C. to benefit threatened mountain caribou, even before the first gun has been loaded.But whether the B.C. government listens to the public, or to the scientists who say the kill is vital for caribou recovery, remains to be seen.  Chris Ritchie, manager of species at risk recovery for the ministry of environment, said Wednesday the response has been overwhelmingly negative since the proposed aerial wolf kill became widely known in February.

“I’m trying to think about anything that was supportive and I can’t think of anything,” Ritchie said in an interview.

The province’s mountain caribou science team has recommended: immediate aerial removal of wolves that threaten herds with fewer than 50 animals; immediate augmentation of the South Purcell herd and all herds with fewer than 20 animals; and immediate but gradual reduction of moose densities throughout the mountain caribou range through adjustments to hunting regulations that allow for increases in cow moose harvest and hunting seasons.

The provincial goal is to increase the mountain caribou population — now estimated at 1,800 to 1,900 animals — to the pre-1995 level of 2,500 animals within 20 years.

Ritchie said the science team’s advice is “not to be taken lightly” but noted that their recommendations do not necessarily consider the political challenges in the face of adverse public opinion.

“It makes it a challenge. The practical, technical side, I think, is sound.

“If we want to maintain some of these specific herds that are in peril, we need a tough decision.”

He said no specific recommendation has yet been made to government.

As of last fall, trapping and hunting had killed about 35 wolves over the past three years in mountain caribou recovery areas, not nearly enough to sufficiently boost threatened herds, he said.

Christie said wildlife officials “basically need to remove an entire pack,” rather than pick off one or two by hunting or trapping. “That leaves us with not many options.”

The caribou recovery program has a budget of $630,000 in the fiscal year ending March 31, covering everything from caribou surveys to monitoring snowmobile activity to predator-control projects.

Sterilization pilot projects targeting the breeding alpha male and females are also underway in at least four packs to determine the effectiveness in controlling wolf populations, he said.

The strategy behind liberalized hunting of moose? Fewer moose (the primary prey of wolves) means fewer wolves and therefore a greater chance for caribou (a secondary prey source) to increase.

So far, hunters haven’t responded as the ministry had hoped in two pilot areas, one near Revelstoke and one in the Parsnip drainage east of Prince George. “The hunters have to recognize an opportunity,” Christie said. “There’s human nature: ‘I’ve always hunted here. Why should I go there?’ It doesn’t happen overnight.”

Caribou population surveys are underway and will give officials a better idea of the success of recovery initiatives.

Robert Serrouya, a member of the B.C. mountain caribou science team and a doctoral student at the University of Alberta, said tough decisions across the board are needed to save the mountain caribou, including management of predators and prey, mechanized recreation and forest harvesting.

“It does sadden us that some wolves and cougars will have to be killed to save these endangered caribou. Aerial gunning is the most humane way of removing wolves, compared to all other alternatives, and it also allows people to selectively remove animals that pose the greatest risk.”

If the caribou die off, then the urgency to protect and enhance the old-growth forests on which they depend will lessen, he fears.

Caribou are already almost extirpated from Glacier and Mount Revelstoke national parks, in large part due to predation, he said.

Not all scientists agree with the caribou science team.

Chris Darimont, a wolf researcher with Raincoast Conservation Foundation, said overharvesting of mountain caribou habitat is the real cause of the species’ plight.

“Logging has deprived mountain caribou of critical food and made them more vulnerable to predation [by providing roads, and better moose habitat, which attracts wolves to an area]. Likewise, snowmobiling — by scaring caribou from prime habitat and granting easy travel routes to wolves — is also in part to blame.”

He said once wolves are shot out of one area, others from neighbouring areas will simply move in. “Helicopters are not cheap. Voters get outraged. And losing wolves is devastating to ecosystems.”

The province has committed to protect 2.2 million hectares of mountain caribou habitat from logging and road building.

With financial backing from big-game trophy-hunting organizations such as the U.S.-based Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, biologists with shotguns flew over the northern Muskwa-Kechika area in the 1980s, shooting more than 700 wolves in four years.

lpynn@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

MacLeans Magazine, February, 2010
by Rachel Mendleson

As a general rule, it’s tough to get the public engaged in science. Which is why Victoria-based environmental researcher Chris Darimont says he’s “thrilled” about the attention his findings on the evolutionary impacts of hunting and fishing have garnered. His paper, which shows how the targeting of large animals has prompted species to get smaller and breed earlier, was just named one of Discover Magazine’s Top 100 Science Stories of 2009. “I know that it’s infiltrating the world of managers,” says Darimont. “And that, for a conservation scientist, is really important.”

In a sense, his findings were always destined for the mainstream. According to Darimont, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and research scientist with the Raincoast Conservation Society, the study gives credence to oft-told anecdotes about how, in generations past, animals were much larger. Based on the meta-analysis of 34 studies, Darimont found that humans have caused swift evolutionary change in species ranging from big horn sheep to Atlantic cod. On average, he says, in the past three decades, body mass has decreased by 20 per cent and reproductive age by 25 per cent.

Though we tend to think of our role in the ecosystem in more civilized terms, in reality, says Darimont, we are predators, “and every predator can have an evolutionary impact on its prey.” Unlike other predators, who typically target the “newly born or nearly dead,” says Darimont, humans go after “large, reproductive-aged adults.” At the same time, regulations often require animals under a certain size be spared, which, says Darimont, “promotes these evolutionary changes.”

With the exception of emails from “a few angry trophy hunters,” Darimont says the feedback he’s received has been overwhelmingly positive. His hope, he says, is that the findings influence policymakers—and us—to rethink how fish and animals are hunted. “It’s not good enough just to do good science,” he says. “It’s got to be injected into the real world, so that changes can be made.”

A new decade has dawned and in a few months yet another year of grizzly bear hunting will commence in British Columbia.The B.C. grizzly bear hunt has been a source of unrelenting controversy. Both sides are stuck in an expert-driven argument in which both camps claim science supports their positions.

It is time that the debate was conducted within the context of ethical considerations, as the present conflict will likely never transcend the deeply entrenched inflexible stances.

In his paper, Environmental Ethics and Trophy Hunting, Alastair Gunn states that “Nowhere in the (scientific) literature, so far as I am aware, is hunting for fun, for the enjoyment of killing, or for the acquisition of trophies defended.”

Many who are outspoken advocates of grizzly hunting do not recognize, or choose not to recognize, that it is a moral matter. They feign that hunting grizzlies is amoral when, in fact, it is not.

They pretend the trivial value of hunting grizzlies somehow outweighs the much greater harm done to the bears.

In Ethics and the Environment, Dale Jamieson writes of the problematic nature of deciding to “choose amoralism and opt out of morality. The very ties that bind us to a society entangle us in a morality. Morality is ubiquitous; amoralists are rare.”

The compulsion to kill these intelligent, powerful and beautiful animals in order to “bag a trophy,” as opposed to simply observing and fully experiencing an encounter of two inextricably linked species, is something poll after poll has shown the average British Columbian cannot fathom.

Doug and Andrea Peacock address the human-bear connection in their book The Essential Grizzly:

“The concurrent colonization of North America by brown bears and humans is a remarkable story. Both men and grizzlies . . . lived together for thousands of years, and perhaps travelled the same route south to the continental United States. Genetic evidence indicates a single invasion for both grizzlies and humans . . . ”

Grizzly bears are primarily shot and killed for gratuitous reasons. They are targeted by trophy hunters and guide outfitters for entertainment or for profit, with approval by government authorities who sanction this activity as a legitimate management tool.

Michael Nelson and Kelly Millenbah have stated in their recent paper The Ethics of Hunting that “To the degree the wildlife community begins to take philosophy and ethics more seriously, both as a realm of expertise that can be acquired and as a critical dimension of wildlife conservation, many elements of wildlife conservation and management would look different.”

Imagine a scenario in which wildlife managers and the politicians they must answer to were required to incorporate ethical considerations into the decision-making process for the grizzly hunt.

The debate would no longer be limited to metrics such as population estimates, kill quotas, harvest-able surpluses and other strictly mechanistic arguments which lend themselves to endless stalemates.

According to Paul Paquet, a former member of the B.C. government’s grizzly bear scientific panel, the fact that we can hunt grizzly bears does not mean that we ought to hunt them.

Further, while science provides information, it does not give us permission to do things. In other words, the statistics that have been generated ostensibly to inform, but in actual practice to justify, the trophy hunting of grizzlies do not contain an intrinsic approval to do so.

Unfortunately, B.C. is saddled with a policy framework for wildlife conservation and management in which ethical considerations simply do not exist.

Large carnivores, in particular grizzly bears, pose a threat not so much to human “life and property” rather to human self-conceptualization. They challenge our imagined “rightful place” in the world, primarily our hegemony over nature and its non-human inhabitants.

It is this mindset that blocks us from extending ethical considerations to grizzlies, for instance, both in the way we govern our society’s interactions with such animals and in how we wield power over bears given our technologically based supremacy (high-powered hunting rifles, jet boats, helicopters).

To evolve B.C.’s relationship with large carnivores, we could start by placing greater emphasis on examining the ethics and morality of the very concept of hunting for recreation and entertainment, as opposed to elevating trivial values like trophy hunting grizzlies above the welfare of the bears themselves.

— Chris Genovali is the executive director of Raincoast Conservation.

A disturbing number of grizzly bears are being shot as ‘control kills’ in BC’s Bella Coola valley. Most of these kills are as a result of humans who don’t secure bear attractants. Despite this, virtually no enforcement action is being taken against individuals responsible for the needless deaths of these bears.

Raincoast is calling on the BC government to reform the Wildlife Act so that provisions addressing bear attractants are more stringent and enforceable. We are also calling on the government to provide sufficient funding for Bear Smart/Bear Aware education in the Bella Coola valley.  More details are in the letter.

Go here to send a letter to Environment Minister Barry Penner to express your concerns about their approach to grizzly bear management.

Your support makes this work possible! Click here to support the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

By Chris Genovali, Special to the Victoria  Times Colonist,
January 21, 2010

A new decade has dawned and in a few months yet another year of grizzly bear hunting will commence in British Columbia.  The B.C. grizzly bear hunt has been a source of unrelenting controversy. Both sides are stuck in a continual expert-driven argument in which both camps claim science supports their positions.

It is time that the debate was conducted within the context of ethical considerations, as the present conflict will likely never transcend the deeply entrenched inflexible stances.

In his paper, Environmental Ethics and Trophy Hunting, Alastair Gunn states that “Nowhere in the [scientific] literature, so far as I am aware, is hunting for fun, for the enjoyment of killing, or for the acquisition of trophies defended.”

Many who are outspoken advocates of grizzly hunting do not recognize, or choose not to recognize, that it is a moral matter. They feign that hunting grizzlies is amoral when, in fact, it is not. They pretend the trivial value of hunting grizzlies somehow outweighs the much greater harm done to the bears.

In Ethics and the Environment, Dale Jamieson writes of the problematic nature of deciding to “choose amoralism and opt out of morality. The very ties that bind us to a society entangle us in a morality. Morality is ubiquitous; amoralists are rare.”

The compulsion to kill these intelligent, powerful and beautiful animals in order to “bag a trophy,” as opposed to simply observing and fully experiencing an encounter of two inextricably linked species, is something poll after poll has shown the average British Columbian cannot fathom.

Doug and Andrea Peacock address the human-bear connection in their book The Essential Grizzly:

“The concurrent colonization of North America by brown bears and humans is a remarkable story. Both men and grizzlies … lived together for thousands of years, and perhaps travelled the same route south to the continental United States. Genetic evidence indicates a single invasion for both grizzlies and humans….”

Grizzly bears are primarily shot and killed for gratuitous reasons. They are targeted by trophy hunters and guide outfitters for entertainment or for profit, with approval by government authorities who sanction this activity as a legitimate management tool.

Michael Nelson and Kelly Millenbah have stated in their recent paper The Ethics of Hunting that “To the degree the wildlife community begins to take philosophy and ethics more seriously, both as a realm of expertise that can be acquired and as a critical dimension of wildlife conservation, many elements of wildlife conservation and management would look different.”

Imagine a scenario in which wildlife managers and the politicians they must answer to were required to incorporate ethical considerations into the decision-making process for the grizzly hunt.

The debate would no longer be limited to metrics such as population estimates, kill quotas, harvestable surpluses and other strictly mechanistic arguments which lend themselves to endless stalemates.

According to Paul Paquet, a former member of the B.C. government’s grizzly bear scientific panel, the fact that we can hunt grizzly bears does not mean that we ought to hunt them.

Further, while science provides information, it does not give us permission to do things. In other words, the statistics that have been generated ostensibly to inform, but in actual practice to justify, the trophy hunting of grizzlies do not contain an intrinsic approval to do so.

Unfortunately, B.C. is saddled with a policy framework for wildlife conservation and management in which ethical considerations simply do not exist.

Large carnivores, in particular grizzly bears, pose a threat not so much to human “life and property,” rather to human self-conceptualization. They challenge our imagined “rightful place” in the world, primarily our hegemony over nature and its non-human inhabitants.

It is this mindset that blocks us from extending ethical considerations to grizzlies, for instance, both in the way we govern our society’s interactions with such animals and in how we wield power over bears given our technologically based supremacy (high-powered hunting rifles, jet boats, helicopters).

To evolve B.C.’s relationship with large carnivores, we could start by placing greater emphasis on examining the ethics and morality of the very concept of hunting for recreation and entertainment, as opposed to elevating trivial values like trophy hunting grizzlies above the welfare of the bears themselves.

Chris Genovali is the executive director of Raincoast Conservation.

Predatory behaviour of humans is causing some species to shrink at an unprecedented rate, says a Victoria research scientist whose study has been deemed one of the top science stories of last year.Chris Darimont, a research scientist with Raincoast Conservation Society and postdoctoral researcher in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found fishing and hunting are causing the planet’s most rapid evolutionary changes.

The research paper, first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has been slotted at No. 30 in Discover Magazine’s Top 100 Science Stories of 2009. The list, which includes only a handful of Canadian stories, is being revealed throughout January on the magazine’s website.

While most predators take smaller and weaker prey, humans target the largest animals — whether salmon or grizzly bears. Combined with large harvests,that means species are getting smaller and breeding earlier, so they can have offspring before they’re large enough to be targeted, Darimont’s study found.

“If you consider things like fishing, this is of huge importance,” Darimont said in an interview.

“It means we are harvesting away our future bounty by causing fish to shrink in size and breed at an earlier age. From a human perspective, we are essentially whittling away future opportunities to have a sustainable industry.”

From the ecosystem perspective, humans taking the biggest and strongest can have ripple effects that reverberate up and down the food chain, he said.

“The public knows we’re taking away too many fish, but the threat goes above and beyond numbers,” he said. Trophy hunters who prize the big horns on bighorn sheep have caused average horn length and body mass to drop by about 20 per cent over 30 years, the researchers discovered.

“We’re changing the very essence of what remains, sometimes within the span of only two decades. In not only an ecological, but also an evolutionary context, we are the planet’s super-predator,” Darimont said.

The research seems to be creating a stir, he said, because it compares humans with other predators, which take juveniles or weaker animals, usually resulting in prey species becoming bigger and stronger.

The findings should be a wakeup call to resource managers, policy makers and commercial harvesting industries, said Darimont, who is hoping the exposure will result in changes in hunting and fishing regulations. “We should be harvesting at far, far lower rates so that, even if we choose the largest,it would have less of an impact,” he said. “And, if we think this is important, we should forego our preference for these trophy specimens.”

Darimont said he is thrilled the paper is attracting so much attention. “At Raincoast, we try to do good science and get that science to reach the public and decision-makers, so this has been a spectacular success,” he said.

Scientists are collecting hairs from live bears to prevent population declines as a result of declines in a principal food source: salmon

For most of May, Chris Darimont, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, poured liters of fermented cattle blood mixed with pureed rotten fish guts on 3,000 square kilometers of British Columbia’s coastal wilderness.

Darimont’s potent cocktail, dubbed “stink sauce” by his field crew, is key to a new study that examines the relationships among salmon and coastal grizzlies by mining their hair for unprecedented data on their diet and health.

For a 180-kilogram male grizzly, the stink sauce is akin to the call of the Pied Piper—it’s irresistible. And as the bear comes in for a whiff, the barbed wire circumventing the lure snags its hair. “We’re luring them in for a sniff of something and in return we’re taking their hair,” Darimont explains. “It’s sort of like forensic ecology.”

In the short term the study’s goals are to rapidly assess the health of coastal carnivore populations with respect to the salmon on which they depend, says Darimont, who moonlights as a research scientist for the Sidney, British Columbia–based Raincoast Conservation Foundation (RCF), which is spearheading and largely funding the five-year study.

Humans aren’t the only ones affected by poor salmon runs. The abysmal sockeye run on British Columbia’s Fraser River this summer was such big news it precipitated a federal inquiry into the fish’s disappearance. Pink and chum salmon runs along province’s central coast haven’t been doing so hot in recent years either, which raises questions about the long-term welfare of
coastal grizzlies that feast on them.

Government helicopter surveys conducted this fall along the Kimsquit River area north of Bella Coola, British Columbia, tallied below-average numbers of grizzly adults and cubs. This suggests poor salmon returns of prior years might be taking their toll on the bears, starving them of their primary prehibernation food source. “The science of it says you’re going to have a density of bears and productivity of the population proportional to the salmon base,” says Barrie Gilbert, a retired wildlife biologist from Utah State University in Logan.

Coastal grizzlies are a different beast altogether from their smaller interior cousins. The more salmon a male eats, the larger his skull grows; the more fish a female eats, the earlier she’ll reach reproductive maturity—and the more cubs she’ll have each year.

The population density of grizzly bears in Alaska’s salmon-rich areas runs 10 to 20 times higher than those in the sans-salmon interior of the state. The more fish in an ecosystem, the more grizzly bears that can be supported. Remove the salmon from an ecosystem and grizzly numbers drop, which is what happened over the short term when Owikeno Lake’s salmon stock went AWOL in coastal British Columbia in the late ’90s. “There are very few biologists who will argue that salmon aren’t a key limiting factor to grizzly bear numbers on the coast,” says Garth Mowat, a senior wildlife biologist with the British Columbia Ministry of Environment.

Grizzlies also act as nutrient conveyor belts, dispersing the nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich salmon carcasses across the forest floor like fertilizer. “As we lose either bears or salmon or both along the coast of British Columbia, then we’re also affecting the health of the forests,” Gilbert
says.

Stink sauce and the blood shed

But back to the juicy stuff: stink sauce, which is stored in a custom-built “blood shed”.

After the nearby barbed wire snags coarse guard hairs from the bear’s outer coat, the fur’s DNA is sequenced to divulge the number of individuals, their species and gender. “With those data alone we can track bear numbers over time… and see how they fluctuate with salmon numbers over time,” Darimont says.

Next, he and his colleagues will run stable isotope analyses on the hair to estimate of just how much salmon the bear consumed during the previous year’s salmon run. Finally, information on the bears’ hormonal states is extracted from the samples: Cortisol gives a picture of stress levels,
thyroxin provides an index of protein depravation or starvation, and sex hormones provide insight as to whether a female had cubs in the past year—all this from a clump of hair.

Darimont and his co-workers collected 550 hair samples this year from their study area near the town of Bella Bella, which lies halfway up British Columbia’s coast. The genetic work will roll in later this month, and the hormone work should take another three months. Together, this should provide the RCF with enough data to publish a “rapid but tentative” assessment.

“We’re hoping that we’ll get some very fine-scale intimate insight into the relationship between grizzly bear populations and health and salmon consumption,” Darimont says. “It’s the first work of its kind.”

By learning more about the relationships among salmon abundance and bear population dynamics, Darimont hopes to be able to determine whether there is a threshold of the spawning salmon biomass that would prevent the coastal grizzly bear population from declining. His data set could also help map out the consequences on bear numbers from human salmon harvesting—20 percent more or less, for example.

And things are starting to look up for grizzlies and at least one of their major food sources in the area. John Reynolds, a conservation biologist at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, reports that the pink salmon have come back with a vengeance this year, on the heels of record lows in 2007 and 2008: “The grizzlies, of course, can eat the pinks, so it’s not all doom and gloom right now.”

Caption: WHERE’S THE FAT? Grizzlies aren’t as much interested in the protein in salmon as the fat, which fuels their high-energy winter hibernation.